IDEA #90 - Footer Ads in Email

By Steve Poland • November 11, 2008

Why should Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and others, be the only ones earning money from footer ads? The user should make some money too — and it’d be fine if there was 1 more ad in the footer — maybe even a visual banner ad (a la RSS feeds).

The real question is how to accomplish this, and that is likely why it has never happened. You might need a browser plugin that would see when you send off an email — and you’d likely have a black-list of recipients that you don’t want to receive the ad in the footer.

This brings me back to my one idea about user-approved advertising (which Facebook has done now in a sense with Beacon). These ads in the footer of your email don’t have to be meaningless from you (the sender), they could be things (sites you use; products you’ve purchased) in your footer. They could be your commerce-related “tweets” from Twitter; or from your Facebook newsfeed.

Don’t forget about Outlook — this might be an easier plugin to use.

But plugins are a barrier for most people to use your service. So it might be that the service providers themselves (Hotmail, Gmail, etc) would have to give you this functionality…. unless you have another idea?

As always, all of these ideas are here to stimulate other ideas. Use the comments section to give more ideas for this idea — and by all means, if you feel one of these ideas is worthy of your precious time, then go on an execute on any one of them.

IDEA #74 - FMail (Facebook App) I think there’s enough open architecture in the Facebook API that would allow someone to create a Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo! Mail/Zimbra copycat. The current Facebook mail/messaging is very simple (no BCC, no forwarding, no quick access to...
IDEA #8 - Anonymous Email Address to Your Cell Simple one-page website — input your cell phone number, select your phone carrier, and choose your own identity (email address) that will allow you to receive text messages to your cell. As of right now,...
IDEA #51 - Email via Snail Mail, for free! I had this idea a few months ago, but saw that someone had already created this service (see L-Mail). Now a new start-up called Postful is entering the business. Basically, for $0.99, they’ll take an...
Marshall Kirkpatrick: SMS/IM/Email Alerts for RSS Feeds Here’s another SMS idea… Former (yet current) TechCrunch contributor (editor) Marshall Kirkpatrick listed his demands for a SMS/IM/Email alerts system for RSS feeds: I use services like this extensively, some of which I do pay...
IDEA #88 - Rent Your Twitter Background & Avatar I’m going to put three(!) ideas in here that are quick. The Twitter API has now given access to your profile background image (update_profile_background_image), profile avatar (update_profile_image), and profile design colors (update_profile_colors). Apparently Ian Schafer...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Comments

4 Responses to “IDEA #90 - Footer Ads in Email”

John @ AffiliateObsession on December 19th, 2008 11:15 am (perm link)

I think footer ads are a great idea and using Outlook (express) is an easy way to implement them.

If you have a mailing list already, it might be easier to use a newsletter format and just include ads in them that way.
Mark Cathcart on December 19th, 2008 5:37 pm (perm link)

Complete waste of time, money and more importantly bandwidth and storage. Who are these numbskulls who actually read these ads and act on them? Answer no one. This is another Internet get rich quick scheme, no matter how targeted the ads are and how relevant they are to the content of the email. The emporer has no clothes.
lukas on December 22nd, 2008 11:48 pm (perm link)

there is some austrian startup called http://www.emailchartiy.com with an awful website, but they really have an interesting business model with footer ads as a CSR tool
Greg Battle on January 19th, 2009 2:19 am (perm link)

check out http://www.reply4all.com . i am good friends with the founder.